Thanks to its illumos base, Joyent’s SmartOS already had several key features for a cloud operating system, such as the ZFS file system, the dynamic tracing possibilities of DTrace, network virtualization with Crossbow, and operating system-level virtualization (Zones) to isolate virtual operating systems, all running on the same kernel. However, one essential piece was missing in this puzzle of enterprise technologies: hardware virtualization. Granted, a few years ago OpenSolaris had Xen Dom0 support (called xVM), even with hardware virtualization, but the project was abandoned even before Oracle walked away from OpenSolaris.

Joyent (which is a member of the Open Virtualization Alliance dedicated to the awareness and adoption of KVM) believes in the thesis that the best hypervisor is the host operating system itself, because anyone attempting to implement a thin hypervisor would end up retracing the history of operating systems. This is exactly the vision of KVM, so when Joyent decided in the fall of last year that it needed to port KVM to SmartOS, this was a natural (but not trivial) choice.

Because its resources were constrained, Joyent decided to focus exclusively on KVM support for Intel processors. More specifically, a machine running KVM on illumos needs an Intel processor with VT-x and EPT (Extended Page Tables), such as the Nehalem Core i3/i5/i7. However, the developers made sure that they didn’t make decisions that would impede later AMD support. Also, only x86-64 hosts and x86 and x86-64 guests are supported. Apart from these constraints, one of the design goals was that the KVM port to illumos would maintain compatibility with the QEMU/KVM interface as much as possible.